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What makes someone's life go well? This question is understandably central to both philosophy and therapy. In philosophy, it is a foundational question for moral theory. If one goal of a moral theory is the promotion of happiness or well-being, then we want to know what well-being, fundamentally, is. Similarly, if one goal of therapy is for the client to become better off or happier as a result of the therapeutic process, then therapists, too, should have some interest in the question of what makes our lives go well.
In philosophy, there are three standard answers to our question:
- Pleasure. What makes a life go well is simply pleasure. Conversely, what makes a life go poorly is pain. The quality of a life consists of the sum of its pleasure minus the sum of its pain.
- Desire-satisfaction. What makes a life go well is the satisfaction of one's desires. Conversely, what makes a life go poorly is the frustration of those desires. One may desire pleasure, but one may desire other things as well (even pain). The quality of life consists of the degree to which one's desires are satisfied.
- Objective list. There is an "objective list" of the things that make our lives go well or poorly. This list may include pleasure, but it may include other things, as well: companionship, knowledge, aesthetic appreciation, and so forth. One's life goes well just to the degree that one partakes of the items on this list.
There is extensive debate about which of these views is correct but this list is usually taken to be, if not exhaustive, then at least representing the most compelling answers to the question of well-being.
If we are thinking of things from the point of view of therapy, however—either as providers or as clients—this list can feel curiously incomplete. In general, our aim in therapy is not to increase pleasure, nor to obtain items on some preset objective list. It is something of an axiom in most approaches to therapy that the aims of therapy are set, in some sense, by the client herself. But these need not, and typically will not, correspond to the satisfaction of her desires. For it may well be that we have desires which, while strong, fail to represent us as we are, and whose satisfaction would not, in the end, make us happy.
When we think about setting the goals of therapy, we typically speak a language different from the language of desire, a language more focused on aims and goals. This is perhaps clearest in the form of therapy known as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). In ACT, our aim is to help the client articulate her values and to pursue committed action toward those values. This is a broadly psychological picture of what well-being might look like, but it is not a psychology that centers on desire.
I have previously suggested that one difference between ACT and earlier forms of cognitive therapy is that it helps itself to a notion of intention. Our intentions, like our desires, seek to shape the world in certain ways; but, unlike desires, intentions have a degree of commitment, one which arguably makes us a better candidate for representing who we are. So it may be that ACT, and other contemporary forms of therapy, point us towards a conception of well-being that is not on the standard philosophical list: a person's life goes well just insofar as she satisfies her intentions.
While it is somewhat distinct from standard philosophical theories, it is also intuitive. When many of us reflect on our lives, we reflect on relationships and projects that we have sustained over time and, going forward, intend to continue to sustain. These relationships and projects do indeed satisfy our desires, but arguably that is not what makes them so central to our well-being. Rather, it is that they are the manifestations of our intentions and commitments, to other people and to our own aspirations. These are the things that, on this kind of therapeutically-minded approach, make life go well.
Asked about what makes people happy, Sigmund Freud reportedly answered: "love and work." That is, of course, a kind of objective-list view. Understood in a more contemporary idiom, we can think of this remark as underscoring the significance of goal-directed action for human happiness, and as enumerating two of the most perennial human goals. Freud's remark indicates that happiness is less a matter of having our desires satisfied than it is a matter of setting audacious goals for ourselves and then persevering towards them.
